Vajolin (Violin)

David E. Kemp, a former drama professor at Queen’s University, is the
author of The Pleasures and Treasures of the United Kingdom.

Born and raised in Yugoslavia, Marijan Megla immigrated to Canada in
1991. Frustrated with the illogical nature of English, he developed a
phonetic code that he has applied to these stories about a postwar
Croatian village. The stories have been edited and translated into
conventional English by Reg Silvester, a well-known prairies writer and
editor. The stories, in Megla’s own shorthand, share the pages with
Silvester’s translations.

Megla, a pipe fitter by trade, learned his English in the oil fields
and on construction sites. The language in these stories is gritty and
realistic, but the stories themselves are Old World in sensibility;
their characters are reminiscent of those in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s
“Gimpel the Fool.” Among the characters populating the mid-European
village of the 1950s are Father Malek, a priest with a weakness for
cards and wine; Julcha Neni, the healing woman; and Old Laichi Bachi,
the miller. The tenor of those stories with an Edmonton setting is much
the same.

The book’s only real flaw has to do with the decision to print the
author’s shorthand version alongside the English translation. Not only
is this layout distracting, but the cramping of the stories into a
two-column half-page format makes for difficult reading.